For the love (and hate) of Mike

The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The combination of these qualities makes General Sir Mike Jackson’s autobiography utterly compelling.

Not since Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery in the 1940s has any head of the army been better known to the public or aroused more passionate love and loathing within the service. From his press briefings on the confused street-fighting in Northern Ireland in the 1970s to the intricate symphony of diplomacy and threat he composed to achieve peace in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Jackson has provided a model of the modern military commander, media-friendly, internationally minded and politically sensitive. Yet the failures are equally instructive, from his equivocal role in the Bloody Sunday shootings to his supervision of the army’s over-deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The book has created headlines with its charge of ‘intellectual bankruptcy’ directed at Donald Rumsfeld in particular and, more generally, at the neo-con axis of idiocy within President Bush’s cabinet for its failure to plan Iraq’s post-war future. Such planning is integral to the pattern of Jackson’s career. This has been shaped by Northern Ireland, and the need to learn how military operations can assist the growth of civil society. He is not alone. The Troubles taught a generation of British soldiers to think of victory, not in terms of toppling statues and grandstanding, mission-accomplished speeches, but, in the cold Clausewitzian phrase, as ‘the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means’.